Music News

XXXTentacion, the young rapper with a controversial past who was shot and killed last week, has the most popular song in the country.

"Sad!" the lead single from this year's ?, rocketed to the top of the Billboard 100 this week after an outpouring of grief, outrage, and heated online encounters following his death. The song took the top spot from Drake's "Nice For What" and beat out Beyoncé and Jay-Z's joint effort "Apeshit." According to Nielsen, “Sad!” was streamed nearly 50 million times this week – up from about 15 million – a massive increase that shot it up from number 52 on the charts. Its previous peak, in March, was number 7.

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EDITORS’ PICK: Meek Mill, Legends of the Summer
Meek Mill’s legal battles and advocacy for criminal justice reform have made him a folk hero. This four-track EP seems designed to sustain heightened public interest in him – at least until he can record a proper follow-up to last year’s Wins & Losses. While brief, Legends of the Summer capably distills the usual Meek Mill elements: There’s a fire-breathing, elbow-swinging banger (“Milladelphia”), a radio-baiting R&Bae jam (“Dangerous,” with the ubiquitous Ty Dolla $ign and PnB Rock), a thuggin’ in the club number (“1am”) and, most importantly, “Stay Woke,” a rumination on broken friendships, bad life decisions and possible redemption in line with the contemplative tracks that made him one of this decade’s most complicated yet beloved street rappers. “I’ve got the key to the streets!” he boasts on “Milladelphia.” Yes, he does. Mosi Reeves

Future, Beastmode 2

Years & Years, Palo Santo

Kinky Friedman, Circus of Life

Immortal, Northern Chaos Gods

Hifiklub + Lee Ranaldo, In Doubt, Shadow Him!

RP Boo, I’ll Tell You What!

The Nude Party, The Nude Party
This North Carolina group lives up to their cheeky name on their self-titled, bare-bones debut, a flapping-in-the-breeze album that evokes Nuggets garage rock and Out of Our Heads-era Stones.
Rizzla, Adepta
The first full-length from this New York producer and DJ could double as a personal-apocalypse soundtrack. Rizzla transforms any sound they could forage into material for their claustrophobic, frenetic beats – harvested from “acapellas, youtube videos, sermons, [and] field recordings,” according to an interview with Noisey. Maura Johnston

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Shania Twain entered Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena Saturday night walking through the crowd like a prizefighter headed to the ring. The capacity crowd erupted at the sight of the pop-country royal as a drummer in the middle of the floor pounded out the rhythm to Queen’s jock jam “We Will Rock With You.” That incessant beat bled into the bouncy opening of Twain’s own personal victory song, “Life’s About to Get Good,” as she took the stage and stood triumphantly to perform the track off her 2017 comeback album Now.

It was a victorious moment that wasn’t possible on either her 2015 Rock This Country Tour or during her residency in Las Vegas earlier this decade, which marked Twain’s return to the public eye after battling vocal issues and going through a high-profile divorce from husband and musical partner Mutt Lange. While the concerts proved Twain still had the stage presence and voice to present her greatest hits, the question remained if she’d be able to add any new music to her record-breaking pop-country canon without Lange behind the mixing board.

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Boy band Why Don’t We have announced their debut album 8 Letters. The full-length LP will arrive on August 31st.
Why Don’t We’s forthcoming album comes after two years of EP releases from the group, including last year’s Invitation which was the first of their releases to chart on the Billboard 200. To preview their latest, they’ve released the title track, a romantic, smooth power ballad. Previously released singles “Talk” and “Hooked” will also appear on the eight-track project.

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Mark David Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon in New York City in December 1980, has been denied parole for the 10th time. On Thursday, a three-person parole board panel rejected his latest bid for parole, Reuters reports.
“The panel has determined that your release would be incompatible with the welfare and safety of society,” the state Board of Parole told Chapman in a letter. The parole board’s statement was similar to the one Chapman was provided when his request was last rejected in 2016 and a nearly identical reason was given in 2014.

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Set in the scenic foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Lockn’ is a Grateful Dead-centric festival that in the spirit of jamband culture focuses on unique collaborations between artists on the bill. Former Dead members have appeared in some configuration at every running of the festival since it started in 2013, and this year the event tapped stadium-filling offshoot Dead & Company to headline two nights. Among the many callbacks to the songs of Jerry Garcia, the festival included acts that cover a wide breadth of genres, from rock and blues to Americana and roots reggae. Here are the 10 best things we saw at the 2018 Lockn’ Fest.



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EDITORS’ PICK: Christine & the Queens, Chris
“Chris is an LP doubled,” writes Will Hermes. “First, there’s a mostly English-language set, with heavily accented lyrics, charmingly off-kilter syntax, and polyglot asides. ‘Let me taste/On a butch babe in LA,’ she pleads on ‘Damn (What A Woman Must Do),’ lamenting the extremes of ‘what must a woman do/Para follarse’ (sure, look it up). Then there’s a nearly-identical set sung in French, as the singer sucks, chews, and tongues verses in ways that communicate plenty, even if you don’t know a baguette from a bistouquette. The bilingual two-fer doesn’t feel superfluous; in fact, by having both sets share the spotlight, she effectively makes a case for internationalism as our so-called world leaders dismantle it. … Mirroring the music’s throwback electropop flavor, the English phrasing has clearer echoes of Eighties giants: Prince, Michael Jackson, and especially Madonna, though the tempo’s generally more measured, and the vibe more atmospheric, than those artists in their hitmaking prime.“

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Artists these days have a new concern at the forefront of their minds when designing tours and concerts: how they look not just to live audiences — but also to millions, and potentially billions, of people at home. A chief driver of that worry is Instagram.

In the last year, the social media app has added 300 million monthly active users — doubling in size and bringing its total global user count to twice the size of the population of the United States. Of that immense user base, nearly half follow 10 or more verified musicians. And even more are making regularly posts and Instagram stories about music, with concerts a particularly popular photo and video subject. “A show no longer starts when the curtain rises,” entertainment architect Ray Winkler, who designed Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On the Run II tour, told Rolling Stone earlier this summer. “The show starts the moment the first person takes a picture of it.

As Instagram continues on its explosive growth trajectory, artists are employing all sorts of tactics ranging from practical to outlandish to ramp up the visuals of their tours and the create the perfect “Instagram moment,” says longtime concert designer LeRoy Bennett, who’s produced iconic shows for Madonna, Prince, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney and a litany of other household names. Rolling Stone caught up with Bennett on how the trend is changing the concert industry — and where it will go from here.

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A years-long delay did little to quell the demand for Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V as the rapper’s latest album debuted at Number One on the Billboard 200 thanks to the second-best opening-week streaming numbers ever.

Tha Carter V, bound in contractual red tape for years as Lil Wayne worked out his departure from Cash Money, sold 480,000 total copies to open atop the Billboard 200, the rapper’s fourth Number One album, Billboard reports.

The vast majority of Tha Carter V‘s total, 325,000 copies, came from streaming equivalent albums (SEAs), with the album accumulating over 433 million on-demand audio streams in its first week of release; only Drake’s Scorpion generated more one-week on-demand streams in charts history. Tha Carter V also sold 141,000 “traditional” copies.

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Paul Allen, the tech tycoon who co-founded Microsoft and became one of the world’s wealthiest men, died on Monday. He was 65 years old. The cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to a statement from Allen’s company Vulcan Inc.

In a statement, Allen’s sister Jody remembered him as “a remarkable individual on every level.” “While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much-loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend,” she said. “Paul’s family and friends were blessed to experience his wit, warmth, his generosity and deep concern. For all the demands on his schedule, there was always time for family and friends. At this time of loss and grief for us — and so many others — we are profoundly grateful for the care and concern he demonstrated every day.”

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